UAB students and others march during an immigration rally protesting the HB56 Alabama immigration law on campus in September. (The Birmingham News / Tamika Moore)

I'm asked time and time again why our editorial board and me, personally, are so opposed to the Alabama's immigration law. I've answered the question as unambiguously as I can. Now, I'm going to list the top 10 reasons our immigration law is mean-spirited and bad for Alabama.

1. Alabama's immigration law is a disproportionate response for what is a relatively small problem. Before the law went into effect, observers believed Alabama might have as many as 100,000 undocumented residents. That's in a state of 4.7 million people. Don't sweat the small stuff.

2. Alabama's immigration law overreaches. As originally passed, the law would make criminals out of people who aided undocumented residents. If somebody rented an apartment to an undocumented person, that landlord would be a criminal. School officials were made quasi-immigration agents, being forced to determine the immigration status of students and their parents. Everybody doing ordinary tasks, from renewing a car tag to getting a library card in North Shelby County, requires proving citizenship. Many of these provisions have been stopped by federal courts, but some of the most invasive have not.

3. Alabama's immigration law allows law enforcement officers to detain a person they suspect is not a citizen if that person is stopped for another reason. That can lead to U.S. citizens and legal immigrants being held until citizenship is proved. This should not be a police state, but that's certainly a police-state provision.

4. Alabama's immigration law scares people, both undocumented and documented. Many legal immigrants have left the state because they were afraid of the consequences of the law -- being detained, harassed or discriminated against, just because of how they looked. It is morally wrong to create fear in a whole group of people simply because of their heritage and for no other reason but to scare them away.

5. Alabama's immigration law is hypocritical. Under the provision requiring E-Verify, the federal system to determine eligibility of immigrants to work, people who hire housekeepers and yardworkers, for example, are exempted from determining whether the people they hire are documented. So people who can afford maids and lawn keepers get a special exception.

6. Alabama's immigration law splits up familes and causes even U.S. citizens to self-deport. Because many immigrant families are mixed-status -- one or two undocumented members along with several U.S. citizen members -- the families either have to split up or leave together. A law that forces families to split up or U.S. citizens to move to another state or country is abhorrent. Do we really care about family values in Alabama?

7. Alabama's immigration law makes undocumented residents more susceptible to becoming crime victims. They will be reluctant to report crimes because they don't want contact with law enforcement. That not only means crimes against themselves, but crimes they witness committed against others.

8. Alabama's immigration law is an embarrassment for Alabama. Once again, it raises the question of Alabama's motives, in regards to treating people with dignity, compassion and equality. Every person deserves to be treated humanely, whether a U.S. citizen, legal immigrant or undocumented citizen. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says that no state will "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." It doesn't say "deny to any U.S. citizen"; it says "deny to any person." This law violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

9. The law was passed without any forethought to training law enforcement, education workers and others on how to implement and enforce it. There was no funding for training or education. That shows it was meant to be little more than a heavy club with which to bludgeon people than a constructive law to deal with the existence of a real problem.

10. The bill's sponsors said it was passed because the U.S. wouldn't enforce immigration laws. Yet, those same sponsors, after the bill passed, claimed they didn't care about deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, only about chasing the undocumented residents from Alabama to another state. Rep. Micky Hammon, R-Decatur, made it clear the law's goal was to make every part of an undocumented resident's life miserable. The other sponsor, Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, at one point said we should empty the clip on immigration and was later caught on tape using racist language. It is absolutely fair game to question the motives of those who pushed this law the hardest, and their motives appear to represent all that's ugly about Alabama's history.

So there you go. I'll relink to this blog from time to time when somebody wants to know about the problems with Alabama's immigration law. And I'll probably add other reasons from time to time, as well.

We don't have to agree, and considering the comments posted to my blogs over the past few weeks, many of us likely won't agree. That's OK. But it's important that you know some of the reasons our editorial board and I oppose this terrible, embarrassing immigration law and hope some day we listen to our better angels.